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ews of Christians burning down a mosque on Idul Fitri, of course, makes a splash, and knee jerk reactions are predictable. There is anger clothed in religious terms and worry over a backlash getting out of control following the incident in Tolikara, Papua.

People have not forgotten the civil war in Ambon, Maluku, that started with a fight between a Muslim thug, or preman, and a Christian public minivan driver.

But what most people have overlooked is that this communal fight became the trigger for exploding ethnic tensions that had been building up for years, tensions exacerbated by Soeharto'€™s '€œIslamic card'€ policy upsetting the traditional balance between religions in the bureaucracy.

The roots of the Ambon conflict, which started in 1999, were ethnic, and its religious dimensions the result of bad politics.

Now, discrimination against indigenous Papuans is a dirty not-so-little secret, denied for the sake of national unity. The bad politics started during the New Order regime, when anyone defending tribal, community or cultural rights against the state and its crony capitalists was accused of being affiliated with either the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), Free Papua Movement (OPM), the anonymous rabble rousers (Gerakan Pengacau Keamanan/GPK) or the New Left, often followed up by arrest and torture of the '€œintellectual perpetrators'€, to have them confess and leave them broken.

Once I was in a village in Papua where a fight broke out among some villagers. The fight was stopped by three Papuan police officers, who then tried to stop soldiers who appeared to conduct an investigation.

The officers, knowing that such an investigation could mean brutal treatment of '€œsuspects'€, insisted that the case was police jurisdiction and denied access to the soldiers, who did not look at the official National Police uniforms but at their ethnicity.

The result of this confrontation was a shoot-out and a Papuan police officer being shot in the leg.

The situation was saved by a Javanese activist who happened to be in the village.
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Indonesians have grown wary after two generations of witch hunts, mass murder, mob violence and ethnic cleansing ...

But just imagine, firing at a village with assault rifles because some Javanese soldiers could not accept the authority of ethnic Papuan police officers. None of the villagers were hit since they had immediately fled.

In another village my guide introduced me to a toothless man '€” his teeth had been knocked out because he had protested logging on tribal land, at a time that the laws on local governments opened the door for investors to take over from whatever traditional, tribal or communal land rights existed before.

So the man was automatically accused of being a member of OPM, arrested and beaten up to serve as an example to the community.

Then some years later, while working for the Food and Agricultural Organization and doing a survey on coastal villages, I reported that in Jayapura, Papua'€™s capital, all trade was in the hands of South Sulawesi migrants who bought only from Sulawesi fishermen. Papuan fishermen trying to enter the market were boycotted.

Restaurants also bought only from what a Bugis (of South Sulawesi) owner told me, '€œorang kita sendiri'€ (our own people). I also heard stories about the stupidity and primitiveness of the natives on a daily basis.

The frustration and hatred toward the Papuans was palpable, but they were powerless. One professor at the local university once told me: '€œOPM? We'€™re all OPM here ['€¦]'€

In other words, what I witnessed is what most open-eyed visitors to Papua can see: The indigenous people feel like second-class citizens and are already a minority on their own land. So what is the role of religion here?

Religion is often related to the politics of identity. Religion is technically an aspect of culture and culture is what makes and unites a community, and in a larger context, a society.

And talking about community and society, we are talking politics '€” which can be translated into who gets what and how much of it, and reversely, who gets the crumbs. This in turn relates to power, which according to Mao Tse Tung, grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Of course, nowadays intellectual power is more decisive, but who gets to attend university? The last time I visited Papua, in 1999 for a social survey '€” again I was struck by the backwardness of provincial education. In other words, the Papuans are '€œopportunity poor'€.

One post-colonial fallacy is that colonialism is associated with the domination of a Western power over a non-Western population.

Post-colonial regimes vehemently deny the oppression of their ethnic, religious and regional minorities. Oppressing Palestinians is wrong because Israelis are identified as '€œWestern'€.

Oppressing Kurds, Berbers, Chaldeans, Assyrian, Copts, Tibetans, Dinkas, Misqitos and Penan etc. is not colonialism but legitimate nationalism, supported by the appropriate political myth legitimizing the hegemony of the ruling elites.

Another fallacy is that religion is just religion. Religions are belief systems, identity for social groups, ideologies of hegemony, moral teachings '€” and for some, a means to a political end.

For the unwary, who only want to believe, religion may be the battle flag to mobilize them as cannon fodder for the power hungry, ideologues, plotters and schemers.

But the present discourse on the Tolikara incident of July 17 on social media gives hope. Indonesians have grown wary after two generations of witch hunts, mass murder, mob violence and ethnic cleansing; only ushering in corrupt regimes and power elites.

Of course, there are the comforting conspiracy theories blaming the Jews, the Illuminati or other evil aliens, but in their heart of hearts the people know that these are smoke screens to hide inconvenient truths.

What we need is honesty; to admit that social injustice is perpetrated to ethnic and religious minorities and that conflict needs to be resolved by going to the root of the problem.

Social conflict seldom can be explained by playing the blame game or solved by denial and repression, which only may create ill will, inherited over generations until it suddenly explodes in conflagrations that lay cities in ash and drives refugees over borders in the millions, creating more ill will to plague our species to the end of time.
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The writer holds a Master'€™s degree in philosophy from the University of Indonesia and a diploma degree in social ecology from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, the United States.